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Robert Fisk is a prominent British journalist and Middle Eastern correspondent for The Independent newspaper in London.
Fisk has covered the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the Persian Gulf War, and the conflict in Algeria. He was one of two Western journalists to stay in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war. He wrote a book on the conflict, Pity The Nation. Fisk has also reported the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Fisk is one of the most highly decorated British journalists. He won the Amnesty International UK Press Awards in 1998 for his reports from Algeria and in 2000 for his articles on NATO bombing of Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. He has also received the British International Journalist of the Year award seven times.
After the U.S. launched its attack on Afghanistan shortly following the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks, Fisk was transferred to Pakistan to provide coverage of that conflict. He wrote a graphic account of his own beating at the hands of Afghan refugees.
Fisk has written about being the target of hate mail and death threats from extremist Americans as a result of his critical reporting of US and Israeli policy in the Middle-East. This culminated in the actor John Malkovich's public statement in May 2002 at the Cambridge Union Society that he would like to shoot Fisk as well as the rebel MP George Galloway. [1] (http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/WarOnTerror/Malkovich.asp) Many of his critics accuse him of being overly sympathetic to Islamic terrorists.
During the 2003 Invasion of Iraq and the ensuing U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, Fisk was stationed in Baghdad and filed many eyewitness reports.
Criticism
Fisk has been criticized for publishing the name of the US-appointed judge overseeing the trial of Saddam Hussein. Although the Iraqi Special Tribunal had asked media sources to protect the judge's anonymity, Fisk identified him in his July 1st, 2004 column in the UK's The Independent newspaper [2] (http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk07022004.html) (republished on Counterpunch online). Fisk revealed that judge was Raid Juhia, who had worked for 10 years as a judge under Saddam Hussein and had recently indicted anti-occupation Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al Sadr on charges of murder. Downing Street warned that the judge now faced reprisals from Saddam loyalists. Fisk and his editors stood by his claim that the judge's name had already been widely published in the Arabic media, including Baghdad newspapers.
Charles Johnson's popular weblog, Little Green Footballs, awards an annual award known as the Robert Fisk Award for Idiotarian of Year. The award is awarded by readers, who vote for the biggest "useful idiot" of the year. This award grew out of Robert Fisk's statement following his beating by Afghans, in which he stated, "If I were them, I'd have beaten me too."
The term fisking ("a point-by-point refutation of a blog entry or a news story") is an expression that arose in the blogosphere, named after Robert Fisk.
External links
- The Independent (http://www.independent.co.uk/)
- Robert-Fisk.com (http://www.robert-fisk.com/) unofficial archive of Fisk articles, more or Fisk's writing can be found here:
- Z Magazine (http://www.zmag.org/meastwatch/robert_fisk.htm)
- Counterpunch (http://www.counterpunch.org/archive.html)
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